Battlestar Galactica 11 - The Nightmare Machine

by Glen A. Larson

  "Damn if I know," he said.

  I'm going to get suicidal if I have to keep staring at all these heartbreaking faces, Boomer thought as he glanced around the table at Jolly, Greenbean and Giles. Greenbean looked like the world had just ended and he was depressed that nobody had told him. The rest looked just plain morose.

  "What's the matter with you bozos?" Boomer pleaded.

  "Nothing matter," Jolly muttered.

  "Jolly, not only do you look like the last days of Kobol, but your syntax is shot to pieces. Do you mean nothing is the matter or nothing matters?"

  "Both. Doesn't matter."

  "Being around you guys is like attending a perpetual funeral, I—"

  "Can it, Boomer," Giles said angrily.

  "C'mon, guys, laugh a little. Smile. Try."

  None of them moved a facial muscle. They seemed to have adopted sadness as a style of life. Boomer threw up his hands in despair.

  "Well," he said bitterly, "I don't intend to join the gloom and doom boom around here."

  He grabbed his glass and stalked off, seeking a happy face in the room to build up his own spirits. He couldn't see a single one.

  If Greenbean had known that Boomer was thinking jokingly about suicide, he would have thought his own mind was being read. For the first time in his young life, suicide appeared to be a sensible solution. Anything to rid himself of his deep depression, anything to make him forget that he might be guilty of something horrible, if he could only remember what it was.

  What Lucifer had not anticipated about his guilt relay device was that, while it emitted powerful rays that reached through most of the Galactica to affect its inhabitants' moods, there were also massive doses of the transmitted emotion collected around the relays themselves. Greenbean was being assaulted by the guilt machine more strongly than anyone else aboard ship. It was as if he was at the epicenter of an earthquake of guilt.

  Because he, unlike others, had no knowledge of the source of his guilt, Greenbean's mind was more disturbed than the rest. It was one thing to feel guilty about matters you could understand, but it was much worse to feel the guilt and have no idea of its origins.

  The more he considered his guilt, the more he believed it had something to do with the time he had been lost in deep space. He lay in his bunk nights and tried to dredge up a memory from that time, struggled to revive a moment, but nothing would come. It was all blackness. One moment he was in an attacking sweep on a Cylon raider, the next he was waking up in his viper, drifting idly through empty space. The jolt of going from one to the other in his memory was frightening. The more he thought of it, the more he wished he could just obliterate himself, get rid of the guilt once and for all.

  Lucifer would have been very much interested in the effects of his device upon its chief victim, if he could only have observed them. He might even have curtailed his efforts to make the device more powerful. But he could have no suspicion of its far-reaching potency and so, as a result of his constant tinkering with the device, the guilt aura around Greenbean was growing steadily and becoming more and more unbearable to the young ensign.

  Brie had come to the Life Center to have one of her regular chats with Cassiopeia. Their talks tended to cheer her up. This time she found Cass sitting taciturnly with Dietra, both looking glum. They took one look at the comely blonde lady who'd briefly been still another of Starbuck's favorites, and gave her the saddest pair of dirty looks she'd ever seen.

  Brie, like Boomer, was one of the rare few, unaffected by Lucifer's guilt rays. Her attitude toward life was too cheerful to allow more than momentary gloom to come into it.

  She tried to tell a couple of her favorite jokes, but Cassiopeia and Dietra looked at her as if she'd just sung a dirge.

  "Snap out of it, you two," Brie urged. "I never saw such a case of the blahs."

  "Oh, we're okay, Brie," Deitra said. "Just a little blue. Right, Cass?"

  "Right," Cassiopeia said gloomily. "I'm feeling pretty good, really. I just can't get a few memories out of my head."

  " 'Bout what?" Brie asked.

  "About when I was a socialator. Ever since I've been working with Doctor Salik here in Life Center, using my talents for soothing the pain of sick and injured people, and sometimes saving lives, those old days seem so . . . so trivial."

  "You mean," Brie said cheerfully, "besides feeling that your life was wasted, you're feeling good."

  The remark at least drew a thin smile from Cassiopeia.

  "Something like that," she said. "Oh, I know I performed good deeds then, too, but it's just that I was missing something."

  "Something you didn't know that you were missing?" Brie asked.

  "I guess."

  "You two really are the daggit's dry meal. I'd go chum with somebody else, except you two seem to be about the most cheerful gals around these days. I think I'll take some R&R down in the devil's pit."

  Brie touched the hands of Dietra and Cassiopeia and laughed softly. For a short while, they all managed some of the old cheerful banter, but soon that faded. Soon all three sat as silently as the two had been when Brie had entered. Even though untouched by the effectiveness of Lucifer's guilt machine, Brie could not fight against the strong gloom of her compatriots.

  Uri believed in taking advantage of opportunity. With Commander Adama ill and so many others acting strangely witless, he knew this was a good time to strike. He'd been working furiously, assembling a team of coconspirators, talking to anyone who'd listen, addressing any group containing more than three people with skillful oratory, plotting, planning, urging and wheedling, enticing and inveigling. Already he had convinced a couple hundred people to join him in his crusade to settle on Vaile. He realized that one of the reasons his ranks were swelling so quickly had to do with the growing gloom aboard ship. So many people were dissatisfied that even Uri's inflated talk of a paradise below seemed feasible, even desirable. Anything to get their minds off their shame and remorse.

  He had been able to progress from whispering in corridors and stairwells to addressing small groups in conference rooms, to speaking before a larger audience in one of the main halls.

  He addressed now an auditorium nearly filled to capacity with many from the Galactica's clerical and security personnel.

  "Why shouldn't we have the right to choose where we want to live?" he asked them. "We don't have to live under Adama's tyranny! We can leave. Believe me, Vaile has everything we could ever want in a home planet. It is relatively uninhabited, beautifully suited to our needs, and the people already there would welcome us. And we don't have to be concerned about that piece of propaganda that Adama and his cohorts keep promoting, that lie about how we have a duty to the fleet, of how we are needed. There are plenty of Vaileans eager to take our places after we leave."

  The audience, though unresponsive, did gawk at Uri with interest in his arguments.

  "So," he finished, "what do you say, folks, are you with me?"

  While the agreement of the audience was audible, it was also desultory. Why couldn't they work up a little cheer, a little "we're with you all the way, Uri," a little fervor for the cause? Well, Uri thought, he would take what he could get. What did he care about the nature of these fools' responses? As long as they signed up on his side in large numbers, he could accomplish his goal, which would, if circumstances demanded, include the overthrow of authority on the Galactica.

  He wondered why the mood of so many was so low? Himself, he felt great. His pursuit of the Vailean objective had instilled in him more energy than he'd felt in a long, long time. Not since Carillon, when his skills at rhetoric had placed him at the leadership of an impressive number of people.

  He had overheard Tigh talking with Athena. Tigh had remarked that many of the gloomy members of the Galactica's crew seemed to be afflicted with some form of guilt or other. He had termed the affliction, the "guilt disease." Uri wondered if there had been some outbreak of guilt on the Galactica. If so, he certainly felt none of it. Well, i
f others chose to count their guilts just now, that was all right with him. It seemed that their guilt played right into his hands.

  Lucifer might have been concerned by Uri's lack of guilt. Certainly there was no one aboard the Galactica who had more reason to feel guilty than Sire Uri. His actions back at Carillon had caused many deaths, and would have caused the annihilation of everyone in the fleet, including himself, if he had been successful. More than anyone else, he should have been overwhelmed by the forceful emissions from the guilt relays. But, in fact, he felt none of that guilt. He never felt guilty about anything. There was, therefore, a limit to the effectiveness of the guilt machine. It did not easily induce guilt in someone evil. In Baltar's case, the man's deeds had been so awesomely evil that he couldn't ignore his own villainy. But, for the most part, evil people had to have at least the spark of goodness in them to make Lucifer's device effective.

  Lucifer would have found it ironic that his creation worked best on essentially good people, people who could see the values of relative concepts instead of absolutes. As a result, Uri, with all his reasons for feeling guilty, was gleefully plotting rebellion while Adama, respected for his nobility of character, was in a comatose state, squirming in his bed with guilty dreams. Lucifer would probably have been amused by the irony. Amusement was part of his programming, although guilt was not.

  Apollo watched Sheba and Bojay walk wearily into the cargo hold where he was supervising the unloading of crates from the newly arrived shuttle. Bojay looked especially the worse for wear.

  "What's wrong with Bojay?" Apollo asked Sheba.

  "A touch of hangover, I expect. A few too many cocktails before sleep period. Me, too, a little."

  "But you're not drinkers, the two of you."

  "Nope, not usually. Just a touch of the devil's pit doldrums, I guess."

  "The devil's—the what?"

  "You don't know about the devil's pit? I'm told it's a name given the lower reaches of the ship by its engineers. The devil's pit's an area just below the fuel storage holds and the engines. They say our ghosts are on patrol there."

  "I've heard something about that, but it's just superstition, Sheba."

  "Of course it is. Like all superstition, it explains mysteries. The devil's pit doldrums are those indefinable sadnesses that come over one unexpectedly and for no apparent reason."

  "I know the kind . . . kind of sadnesses you mean."

  Apollo turned away from her and pretended to examine an invoice. Sheba wanted to touch him, gently massage away the kind of sadness he felt. But Apollo wouldn't have allowed that. Not good old colder-than-ice Apollo.

  "I've noticed," she said, "you haven't been your usual ebullient self lately, Captain. Something bothering you, too?"

  "Something."

  "Serina?"

  He was surprised by Sheba's insight. He had been thinking of Serina lately, in the quiet of his cabin, seeing her in fleeting moments in the shadows. Serina had been killed by the Cylons in a gunfight on Kobol. He couldn't have saved her life, but he nevertheless felt guilty for not performing some miraculously heroic act to prevent her death. It was irrational, he knew, to feel such guilt, but he'd never been able to shake the feeling that if he'd been just a little sharper, he might have seen the Cylon warrior in time to prevent him shooting and killing her. In his mind he had seen her fall to the ground over and over since that time. Why couldn't he have been just a few steps closer to her so that the shot that had killed her would have dropped him instead? It always seemed as if he was in the wrong position with his timing just slightly off. If not for such small distances, both Serina and Zac would be alive today.

  "Yes," he said to Sheba, "I've been thinking about Serina some. And Zac, too. Zac was my brother, he was—

  "I know, he was killed."

  "I could have saved him, Sheba. Could have stayed with him and—"

  "And, from what I hear, allowed the Galactica to be blown up along with the rest of the fleet. Everyone believes you did the right thing, Apollo."

  "Yes," Apollo said gloomily.

  "Everyone but you, apparently."

  She gave him a friendly tap on the shoulder, but he didn't react to it. His response brought on her own guilt in a new form. Now she felt guilty that she was not the strong person her father had intended her to be, the female copy of himself. She wanted to talk to Apollo about her father, but she sensed that now was not the time.

  Even after dictating several entries, Tigh didn't feel comfortable doing log duty. He was the perfect subordinate, the ultimate in carrying out someone else's orders. In battle situations, he could take over from Adama and run the helm just as the commander wished. But he had no wishes to be the commander. He had realized long ago that, in becoming Adama's chief aide, he had reached his most efficient duty level. So, the log mike felt like dead weight in his hand as he spoke.

  "I can't fathom what is driving everyone into such bleak moods. I feel nothing of it myself, and some others are apparently their usual selves. It seems ironic to me that just when we should be feeling—"

  His dictation was halted by a knock on the cabin door.

  "Enter, please."

  Athena came in. She looked like everybody else, glum and lethargic. Although Tigh could not know it, Athena had not been particularly affected by Lucifer's insidious invention. Her emotional state derived from her worries about her father.

  "Just me again, Colonel. How is he?"

  "No change. I just looked in on him."

  "My turn, I guess."

  She went to Adama's bedside. Her father was restive. He moved from side to side nervously. It looked to her like he was in the middle of a very bad dream.

  "Should I try to wake him up, you think?"

  Tigh shook his head.

  "Salik says just leave him be. Even if he does wake up, he won't wake up for long."

  Athena remembered the few times she had seen him awake since the illness had first come upon him. He had barely recognized her each time. The last time he hadn't known who she was at all. He'd called her by her mother's name.

  She felt panic inside her as she looked at her father and imagined him dead.

  "Is he going to be all right. Colonel Tigh?"

  "I don't know. We can't even figure what's wrong with him. Salik says—"

  "Whatever's wrong with him, a lot of folks've got it."

  "I've just been thinking exactly that."

  Athena sat on the edge of the bed and smiled up at Tigh.

  "Starbuck was just at me," she said. "He kept saying how he regretted the cheesy way he'd treated me. Well, it was cheesy, true, but I didn't like him apologizing for it, you know? He was so abject and melancholy. I liked him the old way. You couldn't trust him, but he didn't go all oozy over you. Why do men get these urges to dramatize their failings?"

  She was about to pursue that thought when she realized she was, after all, complaining about men to a man. Tigh had always been so avuncular with her that she couldn't place him in the same category with Starbuck and some of the other hotshot pilots, even though her father had once told her that Tigh, in his youth, had had an admirable reputation as a ladykiller.

  "I'm sorry, Colonel Tigh."

  "No need to be."

  "You know, I've been listening to a lot of people gas off. It seems there's one thread. Have you noticed?"

  "Weil, they're all guilty about something. Some past event, some way they treat people, some personal or professional trait. I don't know why, but it's like they all sniffed in some guilt-virus. You know, in the same way Boomer infected so many in the crew that time?"

  Tigh recalled Boomer's disease and the way it had spread so quickly among the fighter pilots. Guilt had taken over the Galactica in much the same way that disease had.

  "You may be on to something, Athena, but I'm not sure what we can do about it. Salik is definite about there being no medical causes for the current plague or whatever it is. I just don't know what we can do but wait it out."
/>
  "If we can wait it out."

  There was a bitter tone in Athena's voice.

  "What are you implying?" Tigh asked.

  "I don't exactly know. There just seems to be such a force behind all this, as if somebody is manipulating us. A puppeteer pulling strings or a chorus master leading us in doleful song. I wish I could figure it out."

  Tigh shrugged.

  "We'll just have to keep working on it. I'm going to set up a team to go through the ship, inspect everything, see what they can find."

  "Seems like a good idea to me. Who're you going to tap for this team?"

  "Starbuck and Apollo, I think. Apollo's been in kind of a funk, too, although it hasn't impaired his efficiency as with most of the others. And Starbuck—well, I especially hate to see him so glum. I'm so used to him bouncing around here enthusiastically. Maybe giving the two of 'em this job'll perk them both up."

  "Maybe. I'll keep my eye out, too."

  "Good."

  Adama stirred. They both looked down at him. Athena studied his face, noted how unhappy he seemed. He didn't wake up, but did mumble incoherently.

  "I haven't seen him so sad since he came back from finding out Mother was dead," Athena said.

  Tigh nodded agreement. Adama did look haunted.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Adama floated through space without a single qualm or any interest that his apparently weightless body was unaffected by the fatal dangers of outer space. The trip across galaxies was restful. Free of the agonies of command, he could enjoy the stars. Untroubled by day to day trivialities, he could see patterns in passing asteroids. His eyes no longer pained by the frequent glare of the Galactica's interior lighting system, he could drift with closed eyes and feel the cool darkness on his eyelids. It was good, this trip, whatever its purpose. The load he had felt before was gone, left perhaps in his bedclothes. He didn't know whether he was dreaming or adrift in some kind of astral-body travel. But he didn't care, it was no concern of his. He would wake up or he wouldn't wake up. For now, the trip was meant to be enjoyed.